Doing the Right Thing, Even Though It’s Wrong, Part 2

In Doing the Right Thing, Even Though It’s Wrong, Part 1, I discussed a situation in which I went with my ethical instincts in “helping” customers, against both the interests of my employer and, as it turned, the customers themselves. We Americans get criticized by the rest of the world, wrongly I feel, for being preachy, sanctimonious hypocrites because we try to impose our opinions on others. And while I feel that impression misses the nuanced position of America on a geopolitical level, I can tell you that I was preachy and sanctimonious about an issue when I worked at Microsoft and Microsoft paid the price for me. Uncomplainingly. Even though I was wrong.

Customers forcing companies to do the right thing…

Now let me turn the tables. Let’s talk about customers who try to force companies to do the right thing, even when it’s wrong. This one was right in my own back yard.

It has been over 8 years since I did routine technical support at my day job, but I purposely leave a few back doors open for customers who are determined to reach me. It is quite possible to get hold of me on my personal cell phone within 30 seconds of visiting my site. Although I am no longer able to handle support requests, occasionally customers ring me up, sometimes with odd results.

The most recent case was a customer who found an extra $3 charge on his credit card statement that appeared to be initiated by us. It had a cryptic, footnoted description and came after a routine charge he agreed with. For reasons of privacy he wasn’t willing to send me even a redacted portion of the statement, and had trouble describing how it appeared on the statement. I immediately suspected it was some kind of charge by the issuing bank that had nothing to do with eSnipe, and asked him to call them. He had. He said they couldn’t identify it.

I was still pretty sure this wasn’t an eSnipe-initiated charge. He was equally sure it wasn’t the bank’s. I told him I would issue a check for the amount of the charge, not pointing out that doing so would be immensely cheaper than handling this as an escalated support incident. Here’s where we get back to the titular theme of this post. He refused to accept the refund I offered for a mistake we hadn’t make. He did it on the very American grounds that he wanted to make sure that other customers didn’t have this problem. He would rather forego my non-refund refund in order to get to the bottom of the problem and ensure that eSnipe wasn’t doing this to its other customers.

Since we handle hundreds of support incidents a week, and I am in frequent contact with the support team, I knew this wasn’t the case. It was an anomaly. The customer kept me on the phone for an hour as we tried fruitlessly to diagnose the problem. Finally he hung up, promising to call the bank. I did the same, because my merchant account vendor happens to be his bank too. I thought I’d call our rep and see if the bank could help figure out his problem.

…even when they’re wrong

While on hold somewhere in menu hell, I got a call back from the customer. He had called the bank a second time, got through to a different person, and found out that it was indeed a charge issued by the bank and not my company. The culprit was weird formatting problem in the way the bill was printed. From what I could tell by his description, the bank had imposed a new fee on him, and didn’t start a new line when it was added as a line item. It came right after the eSnipe charge by coincidence, and thus appeared on the same line as the description of our fee.

But here’s what we can all learn from these shenanigans

There’s a deep, meaningful lesson in all this, I’m sure. I just don’t know what it is. The lesson I want very much to get across to you is that sometimes it’s okay not to force someone else to comply with your ethical code. I can’t do that, though, because even as I was in the middle of this frustrating and vaguely comical experience, I knew that I have been that same customer. I too have tried to make companies I patronize make systemic changes when I knew customers were being treated improperly by them.

Yet here I was, The Company this time, not treating the customer at all badly, and not being in the wrong. Yet any possible defense I raised would sound like stonewalling to the gentleman I was serving. After all, it was right there in black and white on his bill! A charge with our name in front of it! How on earth was I supposed to manage the issue if he didn’t believe this incident was unique, yet he wasn’t willing to send me a scan of the relevant portion of the bill to assist him?

In the end I simply had to remind myself that the customer is sometimes wrong. More about that later.